The online business They have skyrocketed after the pandemic and every businessman wants to rank well on Google to increase his traffic of visits and sales. Many have just created their business website and Google still cannot find them, and therefore does not show them in their searches. But don’t worry, there are ways to get our website to appear faster on Google. During these years another of the essentials for all businesses has been that your company appears on Google Maps. Changes in Google’s algorithm affect positioning and they disrupt the online marketing plans of many companies that cannot stop adapting and constantly reinventing themselves so that Google shows them among their first search positions.
Beginnings of the Google algorithm
The first of Google’s algorithms was PageRank. The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed it in the late 90s in order to find out the importance of a website through the links that other pages received. The initial prototype of the Google search engine was published in 1998. The first big change came in 2003 with Florida whose objective was to penalize web pages that abused spam and keywords. The SEO start it had only just begun. A year later, in 2004, came Austin to penalize the use of fake links.
In 2007 with the arrival of the algorithm Universal Search Google wanted to make Google search engines not only find texts, but also images, videos or graphics, in short, everything that could be found on the web and was capable of being ordered and indexed. In the next few years, algorithms such as Google Suggest or Caffeine that offered users alternatives to the main search and faster search speeds respectively.
Algorithms from 2011 to today
If we look back 10 years ago, Google’s algorithms have been constantly changing to deal with bad practices by users to ensure that their web pages had a good search engine ranking. These are the most relevant algorithm changes.
Panda
Before 2011, positioning a website was relatively simple using practices that would set off all Google’s alarms right now. At this time the fact of repeating the main keyword Throughout the text, the more times the better it achieved a good positioning. With the arrival of Google Panda, quantity was no longer prioritized and quality was rewarded. This change penalized websites with little worthless content and websites that duplicated content without rhyme or reason. At this point, the SEO of the pages began to be prioritized, which is known as the linkbuilding internal, work that is still done today.
Penguin
With Google Penguin, placing inbound links to a website without emphasizing their quality is over. This change ended the link farms and web spam. Then began a new era in which work began on the quality of links and content.
Venice
A before and after in the local searches from 2012. Thanks to the IP of the devices connected to the Internet, the Google search engine was able to know the location of the users and offer them the search results closest to their interests. In 2014 local SEO was improved with Google Pigeon which allowed a local website to position itself ahead of large companies.
Hummingbird and Mobilegeddon
Google’s algorithm was not yet ready to give optimal answers to complex searches. At this time it was focused on the keywords that we wrote in the searches, but not on the construction of a complete phrase. For example, searching for “24-hour pharmacy” is not the same as “where can I find a 24-hour pharmacy in Barcelona? According to the search engine this change positively affected 90% of world websites and this algorithm change was complemented with Mobilegeddon that prioritized responsive websites. These two algorithm changes were complemented at the time, since we do not search the same through voice search on a mobile phone as when we write on the computer.
RankBrain and Fred
The artificial intelligence goes into action in 2015. Adding AI significantly improved Google’s response to its users. This algorithm is based on the study of mathematics and vectors, but really few people within Google really know how it works. In 2017, thanks to the update of the algorithm called Fred, the poor quality links, since now Google takes into account the advertising that is hosted within the web pages. In this way, Google penalizes pages crowded with advertising that do not provide any content of value to users.
Florida 2.0 and Google Bert
The most recent algorithm changes that Google has received in the last two years have been Florida 2.0 and Google Bert. In 2019 the Florida 2.0 algorithm began to prioritize quality content even more than the keywords themselves. Since then it is important that the quality of the texts, images and links is of high quality to offer a unbeatable experience to users. On the other hand, in 2020, Google Bert began to analyze of more human form searches made thanks to natural language processing that is capable of understanding the relationship between concepts.
The future of Google’s algorithm changes will be conditioned by being as close as possible to the way of acting of the human being. AI (artificial intelligence) and voice assistants will play an important role in this case.